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Comment by seanmcdirmid | Hacker News Reader

Thefts are not limited by passwords, the thief will just reset the phone.

I don't know, reproducing a fingerprint is relatively easy to understand (just scan and print), while cracking a password can be more exotic to 'traditional' thieves. When today they'd just wipe the phone, tomorrow they make take the extra step of pulling out the SIM card and unlock with the fingerprint, and sell the data as well.

Your random thief is more worried about cell phone tracking than any data you have on your phone. They will wipe it as soon as possible today, and probably for the next few years; they don't give a crap about your cat photos.

Even if your phone was unlocked, they probably wouldn't bother more than a cursory glance. They have more phones to steal than to bother with is on some random person's phone. When the data is important, the theft will be more targeted.

I see where this assumption comes from, but scraping the personal info off a phone is a thing, and "random thieves" might be the minority when it comes to stealing and reselling phones (at least in europe or asia they are rarely random. It don't know for the US).

I haven't heard of it recently, but a few years ago there was a story on phone operator temporary staff that would offer clients to move their contact info from their old phone to the new one (it's a completely legit service) and keep a backup of the old info to sell it. The price for an entry was something like 2 cents, but data would be sold by batches for about 700~800 dollars.

I didn't find any quick resources in english, just for the numbers there was this piece by trendmicro (to note, they are of course biased to make the number a littre bigger) http://blog.trendmicro.co.jp/archives/4828

I live in Beijing, the first thing the thief will do here is take the sim out and wipe the phone. They will also hawk the phone as soon as possible to maximize turnover, so it's usually possible to buy your stolons phone back within the hour.

Actually, with iOS7s new activation lock feature, thefts are limited by passwords.

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